Arts Plus. Theater.

Bleak Comedy Uproots `I Am A Man'

May 03, 1994|By Sid Smith, Tribune Arts Critic.

In the spring of 1968, already a year in flames, some 800 garbage workers went on strike in Memphis.

Martin Luther King's assassination wraps their struggle in quite a shroud, a case of commonplace strife transformed into epic tragedy. Still, few of us recall details of the strike-King's death obscures at the same time it immortalizes.

Sometimes factual, sometimes fanciful, "I Am a Man," now at the Goodman Theatre, by a Michigan-based playwright who goes by the pseudonym OyamO, profiles the strike leader, a sanitation worker named T.O. Jones (Anthony Chisholm).

Instead of a polemic steeped in hindsight, much of the time OyamO delivers sardonic comedy. He is fascinated by ordinariness and how, even in the midst of revolution, most remain helplessly on the periphery. Well-meaning, uneducated-a rakish buffoon, the police chief somewhat accurately tags him-Jones is described elsewhere as "an ordinary man with an ordinary dream."

King's spectral presence (Ron O.J. Parson) hovers over the production and delivers the real dream. Jones, meanwhile, squares off with henchmen, politicians, organizers and bigots. In all this, OyamO finds raging debate, often black versus black, on empowerment, public leadership and political progress.

Contestants include the white establishment, a self-serving NAACP, Northern labor-union leaders, and even Mutt and Jeff Black Panthers-comic until, in a skirmish with black leaders, one pulls a gun. Police beat the other senseless.

A survivor, not a hero, Jones works to feed his unemployed men and sidestep his wife, not nearly as nobly understanding as Coretta King. When Martin Luther King is killed, in an explosion of black-and-white projections, Jones learns what he has won: a raise of 8 cents an hour.

Director Marion McClinton concocts an Orwellian fantasy with a roving blues commentator and gray, medieval scenery. The performances, like the gimmickry, are uneven-some work and some are belabored. The look is uglier than the surreal garbage that gradually takes over the set like a cancer.

But the comedy, particularly the battle between proper English and Jones' ungrammatical dialect, is very funny. Chisholm infuses this sad-eyed minor leaguer with his raspy voice and the tortured look of a man with ulcers. His speedy, tongue-twisting elocution rushes through as if history, at least here, was on board a runaway train.

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"I Am a Man" plays through June 4 at the Goodman Theatre, Columbus Drive and Monroe Street. Phone 312-443-3800.